On June 25, 1920, my grandfather Leonard Vitkauskas, born in Kaunas. Lithuania, died in Waterbury, leaving his young Lithuanian wife, Mary, and four little daughters to fend for themselves.

I know next to nothing about him. He died when my mother was 3 years old. She remembered little about him.

My grandmother, who was 16 when they married and 21 when he died, never talked to me about him. In her defense, I probably never asked her about him.

From what she was told, my mother said he was hard-working man, a machinist and tool maker in the Waterbury factories.

He supposedly considered any minute when he could have been reading, but wasn't, a waste of time. If a family bookworm gene exists, I inherited mine from him, via my book-loving mother.

What I wonder about him now is did he die of influenza?

Was he one of the victims of the great pandemic that swept around the world from 1918 to 1920 -- the "Spanish flu" that was the deadliest epidemic in the world's history?

I have tried to find out, but I will never know for sure.

What I do know, thanks to the death records in Waterbury City Hall. is that Leonard Vitkauskas died at the age of 35 of lobar pneumonia -- pneumonia that spread throughout a large area of his lungs.

Along with his seven-day struggle with pneumonia, the death record states, during his last two days he also had pulmonary edema, fluid accumulation in his lungs.

Here is what I know of the influenza epidemic: It hit in three waves in 1918 and 1919, with some cases occurring earlier, in 1917, and later, in 1920, the year my grandfather died.

"1920 was a pretty bad year," John Barry, author of "The Great Influenza" said about the pandemic. It wasn't like 1918, but nothing was."

It was the world's worst pandemic. It killed 50 million to 100 million people in little more than two years. By comparison, 16 million people died in World War I and as many as 78 million in World War II.

As Barry points out in "The Great Influenza," at its peak, the flu killed more people in a year than the Black Plague did in a century. My aunt Tina, who was a infant in 1918, got the flu and survived. Today, she is 94 years old.

The flu hit people in their 20s and 30s hard. In his article "1918: The Mother of All Pandemics," Jeffrey Taubenberger states that nearly all flu pandemics have mortality peaks in the very young and the very old, with much lower death rates in between.

The 1918 pandemic added a third vulnerable group: young adults. In the worst years of the pandemic -- 1918 and 1919 -- Taubenberger writes that the influenza death rates for people ages 15 to 34 were more than 20 times higher that ever recorded.

Half of those killed during the Great Pandemic were 20 to 40 years old. The risk of death from flu in that age group was higher than for people younger than 65 than for those older than 65.

Pneumonia, an ailment caused by bacteria, and influenza, a viral illness, went hand-in-hand in 1918.

Instead, they found most victims died from pneumonia after getting the flu. The influenza virus of those years destroyed the cells lining the bronchial tubes and in the lungs. The pneumonia bacteria flourished in that damaged tissue.

So I can say that my grandfather fits a certain profile. He was 35 years old, an age that was vulnerable to the flu in those years.

He died of pneumonia when influenza made people highly susceptible to it.

"It could have been, it could have been," Dorothy Pettit, co-author of "A Cruel Wind: Pandemic Flu in America 1918-1920" said when I told her of my grandfather's death and its possible connection to the 1918 pandemic.

But as Barry and Pettit point out, it's impossible to know for sure. The death records don't say "influenza" for my grandfather.

"There was no test for influenza back then," said Dr. Gregory Dworkin, chief of pediatric pulmonology at Danbury Hospital. So a certain amount of arbitrary decision-making determined what was written on the death record.

Barry said, since penicillin had yet to be created, people died of pneumonia far more often than they do today.

"People died of pneumonia in the 1918 pandemic without ever having influenza," Barry said.

After Leonard died, my grandmother's remaining family in Lithuania sent for her and her daughters to return home.

If there is a crucial point in this story it is this: She didn't.

She married another Lithuanian immigrant, had two more daughters and died in America at the age of 86.

Given the horrors of World War II in Lithuania -- a tiny country stuck between Germany and Russia and their armies in what is now called the Bloodlands, I doubt there would have been any survivors.

The generations continued because she remained in America.

But investigating how Leonard Vitkauskas died has left me with another question: What difference does it make? Does the manner of his death change his life?

Having written in the past about the 1918 pandemic, am I trying to find my own connection to it through him? Is that wrong?

I have an answer to that with somebody else's story.

Dworkin said a colleague told him once that his extended Irish family always uses the same funeral home in Connecticut when somebody dies. It's a tradition.

One day, Dworkin said, the colleague learned why. His Irish grandmother died in the influenza epidemic in 1918. The funeral home, owned by an Irish family, did not charge his grandmother's family much for her funeral.

The tradition of using that funeral home was born in the Great Pandemic.

"Family history is always fascinating." Dworkin told me when I told him about Leonard Vitkauskas. "It's your grandfather."